Intuit will market the online application to the 2.5m small business users of its QuickBooks accounting and business management package, and on its Quicken.com personal and business finance information portal. Intuit already provides online tax filing and payroll services.

Upshot Online costs $29.95 per user per month with no upfront setup charge, no minimum number of users and no minimum rental period. For an unspecified initial period, businesses can sign up for a 30-day, 3-user trial free of charge.

Startup developer Upshot.com claims to be redefining the ASP concept for sales management apps with its new service, which it says requires no training for sales users. Online documentation and a tutorial are provided to help administrators get started. All users have access to telephone and online help.

"I've actually seen [a team of] sixteen people be up and running in less than an hour or so. If they know how to use a browser, they know how to use this," president and CEO Keith Raffel told ASP News Review in a briefing last week.

The company contrasts its solution with conventional sales automation and customer relations packages, which it claims experience a fifty percent failure rate.

"What Upshot Online is all about is being simple, fast and affordable. I don't think any of the other solutions is putting a premium on these things. If you're a multinational corporation trading in twenty-one different currencies, Upshot.com is not the solution for you. It's for [when] you want to have something that's up and running in minutes or days - and salespeople will actually use it - and you don't want to wait a year before it's up and running."

The SFA application was initially launched as a retail product a year ago. Upshot Sales costs approximately $499 per user to buy and has captured several thousand seats. But the company planned to put the product online from a very early stage and now expects most of its business to come through this medium. "There's no doubt that very quickly Upshot Online will become the bulk of our users," said Raffel.

The Online product supports disconnected working in Microsoft Outlook and on Palm Computing and Windows CE mobile devices. Mobile workers can store to-do lists, appointments, contacts and other information offline. The data is resynchronised on reconnection.

The service is managed by Upshot.com on servers hosted at Exodus. Data is stored on a Unix backend, while the application layer is built in the COM component architecture and runs on Windows NT servers.

Upshot.com, headquartered in Mountain View CA, is a venture capital-backed startup with $17m raised to date. Individual investors include Informix CEO Bob Finocchio, Intuit co-founder Tom Proulx and Compaq chairman Ben Rosen.